Karl Erik Andersen's REAL home page

I was born in 1948. The first pop
song I remember was Paul Anka's "I
Love You Baby" which got stuck in
my ear for a long time in 1958. I
grew up in Valnesfjord, east of
Bodø in North Norway.

The two first records I bought were
a Peter Paul and Mary EP with
"Blowing In the Wind" and one with
the Highwaymen singing "Michael Row
The Boat Ashore", "Cindy Oh Cindy", 
"Cotton Fields" and "The
Gypsy Rover" in 1962.

My first single was Pat Boone's "Johnny Will". I remember hearing
a group called the Beatles doing "Love Me Do" in the fall of
1963, and liked them a lot.

I bought my first LPs in 1964, all Beatles. In 1965 I bought
"Bringing It All Back Home" by Bob Dylan, but curiously, never
took the time to go back in time and get his first albums. I stayed 
with Bob until "Street Legal" in 1978.

I started studying in Oslo in 1969, and borrowed Woody Guthrie's
"Dust Bowl Ballads" from the student society record lending
library. Since I also bought a tape recorder (Philips, later a
Tandberg), I taped this LP and listened to it over and over
again. Neil Young was a favourite of mine, too.

In 1970 I met Johanne, an American student at the International
Summer School in Oslo. We kept in touch the next winter through
almost daily letters (should have had e-mail then!), and after
meeting up in London in the summer of '71, she brought her
rucksack and stayed with me in Oslo, where we married in the
fall. Her parents in New Jersey were not happy.

During my years as a student, I took English, sociology and
history, besides reading the Village Voice, stereo and hi-fi
magazines and listening to music. Visiting the US in 1972, I saw
J. Geils Band in Central Park and Taj Mahal at the Bitter End in
Greenwich Village. In Oslo I saw Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young and
EmmyLou Harris during the seventies.

We had kids, Ellisiv in 1974, John Erik in 1980 and Gregard in
1984. Ellisiv married in '96 and she had a girl, Maja in January
'97. Then Siri was born in January '99.

We graduated in 1978 and became teachers in Berlevåg way up
north for a year, before moving to Mo i Rana, where we also got
teaching jobs. I mostly taught Norwegian, English and Social
Studies, but also gave elective courses in photography, media,
word processing and even DX-ing! Johanne is still at the same
school, while I leaped at the chance of a job at the new branch
of The National Library, which was established here in 1989,
partly to recompensate the town for the bad times at the state
steel mill, which had to restructure drastically and fire a lot
of people.

I first worked at collecting all the 240 Norwegian newspapers for
microfilming, then moved to the Sound and Image Archive,
collecting broadcasting mainly through legal deposit.

The Sound and Image Archive, with about 18 people nowadays, is a
very interesting place to work. We collect film, photography,
broadcasting and music. The Media Laboratory restores film and
still pictures, and the IT department is in the Nordic library
forefront of using the Internet for delivery of library and
archive material.

In 1991-92 someone reminded me that Bob Dylan was still alive and
touring. I started listening again. The Bootleg Series 1-3 was
especially revealing of what I had missed out on for 13 years. I
also found the USENET group rec.music.dylan and later subscribed
to the Highway 61 mailing list with the same contents. I was
amazed at how much knowledge some people had acquired, and
started saving some interesting information I found.

In the summer of 1994 I discovered that I could use free software
on my Mac at work to deliver files to any computer in the world
through an international network called the World Wide Web. So I
did that, and from about August that year that Mac was a site on
the Web called "Expecting Rain". I later bought server software,
and have since spent money also on upgrading. In '95 I bought a
Macintosh Performa 5200 so I could sit at home and update the
server at work. Before that I had spent more than 500 hours at
work outside working hours during one year, reading, learning and
making web pages.

Setup was: Macintosh II fx, 20 MB RAM, 160 MB and 1 GB Hard
disks, System 7.5.5, WebSTAR server software and Interaction
chat software. Connected through Ethernet to the Internet.
Most useful software: BBEdit and Photoshop.

On December 2, 1997 the site was moved to a UNIX Apache server at
www.monet.no, and got its own domain name: www.expectingrain.com.

September 1999 update: 
I am now separated and live alone. My Blue & White G3 Macintosh with 
cable modem is of great comfort to me. I bought the old Macintosh II fx 
on which Expecting Rain was first built, for NOK 100 (USD 12).


August 2000 update:
This year I entered my site into the Musicfans network, but will still
be updating it as often as I can, which means mostly every day.
It is now served by vservers.com in the US.

October 2001 update:
Musicfans went bust, and the expectingrain domain name was shut off.
I set up with a new ISP, using the dylanite.com domain and continued 
updating the site, hoping to get the old domain name back from the 
creditors. Although I was allowed to use it.

December 2001 update:
I had to change my ISP and went to silentcircuit.com in Texas. Signed up
again with amazon.com, amazon.co.uk and amazon.de, and put a PayPal 
button on the front page. Initial contributions covered six months of 
hosting and a bigger hard drive for my TiBook.

October 2002:
My TiBook was stolen and I waited 6 months for the new 17" PowerBook.
It was worth the wait. Thanks to Arthur for helping me get the rebate!

November 2004:
This month the site was 10 years old, and I celebrated by giving it a 
redesign and a discussion forum. Thanks to Gregard for the design!